I flew out to the San Francisco Bay Area last sunday, just before the bank holiday, and only got back on saturday morning. It’s been a long week, very scheduled, generally enjoyable, but now I am back safe and suffering the effects of theraputic gardening.

Recap of the week:

Sunday: I flew out on this day, rescheduling my monday flight in the hope of shifting everything backwards by one day; unfortunately I could not shift my friday flight, so ended up staying over for one extra day, overall. (sigh)

Got the taxi to LHR, the flight was pleasant-ish, landed, took the new monorail to the car rental depot, picked the mazda, drove to Palo Alto. Had my traditional post-flight burger and shake in the Peninsula Fountain, popped oer to the Apple store for a browse, and then drove south to Campbell, and the home of Darren.

Darren made me very welcome, chatted, did Frys, went for sushi, sipped some very fine, very more-ish 30yr old – I didn’t know he’d worked in a distillery whilst at college, and has a very much better knowledge of distillery processes than I; he even made some positive suggestions about my crazy idea of buying a cask to lay down.

The whisky relaxed me; felt totally knackered and crashed out.

Monday: Up 0900, bacon butties, a meandering morning and then a drive down to Roaring Camp Redwood Forest near Santa Cruz for a day’s walking. Incredible trees, incredible smell, scenery and chit-chat about new kernel security features. Cruised around Santa Cruz, had a bite to eat, and then went geek-shopping at a local mall. I think Apple shoould be paying me commission, because by the end of the trip I think I made three or four new converts.

Leaving Darren in the evening, I got lost looking for the Marriott, and checked in at the office for a map. There’s 802.11b on the SCA campus now, very convenient for e-mail whilst sitting on the lawn, under the shady palm trees.

Tuesday: Discover that hotel breakfast is insanely overpriced. Spent day in pursuit of e-mail, hanging around SCA. Met up with Edmund at lunch to go Astronomy/Telescope shopping – helping him pick out something for his kid – and then more e-mail and panicing aobut the presentation to be delivered on Wednesday.

Back to the hotel, food, and beer in the bar with Brad. Crash out again.

Wednesday: First day of the conference. Up 0630, shower, scrub, drive at 0730, 0745 start. Brain rather focused on the afternoon presentation, but the stuff in the morning was rather good.

I’m not going to talk about the presentation in this entry; sometime later this week, perhaps. Suffice it to say that it went pretty well, seemed well-received and caused much debate. I don’t actually remember what I said very much (adrenaline) so I’ll move to later in the evening, and note a pleasant dinner in the Tied House with Jason, Ravi, Val, Derrick, Jon, Whit … and really too many people to list exhaustively. Conversation split into equal thirds of work, Purdue history and Motorcycles.

Thursday: Second/last day of the conference. Breakfast with Whit at Caffe Verona in Palo Alto at 0715; drive w/ Whit to MPK to host the monthly Dotsecurity conference call, and head south, back to the conference. Take in the presentations, and trog back to the hotel for a quiet evening doing laundry and chatting with the usual suspects in the hotel bar.

Friday: Breakfast with Whit and Eve (XML Geek Extraordinare) at some place new – Douce France at the back of Town and Country Village in Palo Alto. Stuck for something to do, I wander around and look at various shops, and then decide to go over to my old stomping ground at MTV B29. Somehow in my fazed state, I drove up to Willow and ended up at MPK. Oh well.

Sandwich, E-mail, and a mad dash to the airport. Lots of good security, and a lot more pointless, badly done security, and then I got onto the flight.

I watched the (partial) solar eclipse from the flight, by the simple expedient of puncturing a barf-bag with a pen and wedging it under a window blind, creating a pinhole camera that projected the eclipse onto the wall of the toilet. The cabin staff thought it was clever, the people in the seats next to me just thought I was weird. Nonetheless, it was better than missing it totally.

Saturday: LHR. Taxi. Shower. Bed.

Sunday: In an effort to get back into sync with the UK, I did lots of outdoorsy things – gardening, hedge-trimming, and built a saw-horse out of scrap timber. Loaded the car up with glass bottles to take to the recycling depot, only to get there and find it full-to-bursting. Veg in front of the TV, and my back is screaming from compression/twisting in the exit-row of the aircraft, plus all the gardening.

Now it’s Monday. I’m home, but mentally, I’m a womble.